Vietnam considering long-term "golden visa!" Don't get excited... you wont get one

Vietnam has always seemed to be content to simply sit out the tourism game although you would never know that by coming to visit Da Nang. This place is basically overrun with tourists year round outside of the cold season and this is part of the reason why I love the cold season so much.

The rest of Vietnam though, doesn't have direct flights for the most part and they miss out on a lot of this action and in turn, money that comes along with it.

There are plenty of places that are far more naturally beautiful than Da Nang, but because they are not close enough to an international airport, most of the people that visit this country on their 30-day stamps don't even bother to go in that direction.

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Nha Trang, for example, has about 1/20th the amount of annual visitors and many would argue, I say correctly, that it is a far more desirable place to visit if you have the time. But since it is around 5 hours from the nearest international airport, a lot of people skip it out of the very reasonable fear that they might arrive there, not like it, and then be very limited about what they can do next.

They also have a very small semi-permanent expat populations because visas longer than 90 days are quite difficult to acquire and while you might not think that taking care of this is a big deal every 3 months, taking an entire day to travel out of the country to renew a visa and spending 15 hours in transit, is not something most people are going to be willing to do more than a couple of times.

Vietnam has been aware of the missed opportunities that they have experience by not having any sort of long-term visas outside of investment visas (difficult and expensive to acquire, often illegal) or work visas that require that one actually work. The retirement visa is something that the government has been eyeing up for quite some time but for whatever reason, they have never acted on.

Well recently talk of a "golden visa" came up and apparently the higher ups in the government are seriously considering it and briefly, those of us that live here got excited until we read into it.

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Much like the golden ticket in "Willy Wonka," it is exceptionally unlikely that this change in policy, should it happen, will actually apply to anyone that you know or you yourself. It certainly wont apply to me.

Rather hilariously, and right in the "screw you, peasants!" gut, the government had previously talked about visa waiver programs that were specifically for billionaires and celebrities. I don't think that they really considered the fact that billionaires and celebrities go to considerably more "fancy" locales than Vietnam. This project was dead in the water and I don't know why, but i suspect it is because exactly ZERO billionaires and celebrities desire to live in Vietnam unless they are Vietnamese.

This new "golden ticket" visa is a very vague concept at this point, but I suspect it will end up going down the same route of not really applying to anyone, just like all other projects of this sort have in this country.

At this point the only guidelines that have been defined is that the person in question would need to prove they have the capacity for "owning real estate or other assets of substantial value, having high spending capacity for travel, accommodation and experiences in Vietnam."

This doesn't really mean anything but I can guarantee you that it isn't going to apply at all to people that are just middle-class like me and you who would like to have hassle-free visa experience in a developing country. The ultra wealthy can afford to go to Polynesia, where it is significantly more luxurious than here. I could rattle off a lot of other destinations as well but even though I love living in Vietnam and think it is a lovely place, the government is kidding themselves if they think that this country is a place where anyone with those sorts of resources are considering retiring to or even owning a property in. Combine this with the fact that no foreigner is even allowed to own property, and you have a situation that nobody is going to actually use. Combine yet another factor in the case that this is a communist country, and I believe nobody will even apply for this "golden ticket."

If Vietnam wants to sell access, they are going to have to be more reasonable with their requirements such as Cambodia where you can buy (so I've heard) citizenship for a couple hundred thousand dollars and this is still out of reach for most people. But then we also have Thailand where someone that is pulling down a pension of a couple thousand dollars a month is legally allowed to stay in perpetuity with very little hassle.

I think that maybe Vietnam isn't all that concerned about their tourist sector because they are a pretty large manufacturing center for the world and their tourism industry is a rather insignificant portion of their GDP. In 2020, which is the last year these financial reports were available, Vietnam's tourism income compared to GDP was less than 1%. Compare this to the nearly 20% of Thailand, and it is easy to understand why Vietnam would choose to perhaps sit this one out.

For people that are looking for a place to live and be a digital nomad like I am, you are going to need to stay in Hanoi, Saigon (HCMC), or Da Nang, which at the moment are the only international airports in the country.

This golden visa, which likely wont happen anyway, isn't going to apply to any of us. We are too poor! haha